Month: February 2016

Depending on whom you ask, the Mets have either the best or second-best starting rotation in baseball.

That prompted us to take a snapshot of the National League champions’ starters. The table below looks at three stats that together provide one glimpse of pitching prowess.

Fielding independent pitching (FIP), which measures a pitcher’s talent by isolating results a pitcher controls directly: strikeouts, walks, hit by pitches and home runs.

Strikeouts per nine innings (K/9), which counts how many strikeouts a pitcher averages over nine innings

Earned run average (ERA), which measures the number of earned runs a pitcher allows, averaged over nine innings.

As the numbers suggest, deGrom, Harvey and Syndergaard, the heart of the Mets’ rotation, all have the potential to be Cy Young award winners in 2016.

Wheeler, who was out last season while recovering from elbow surgery, is expected to rejoin the rotation in July. Matz, a left-hander who missed two months last season (his rookie year) after tearing a muscle near the armpit on his left side, will be trying to regain the form he showed in the first half of 2015.

Colon is expected to hold down the fifth spot in the rotation until Wheeler returns. The right-hander, who is entering his 20th season in the majors, reportedly turned down more money to remain with the Mets.

“All these guys are my family,” Colon told reporters on Wednesday.

Perhaps the best stat of all for Mets fans: Barring injury or a trade, the core of the rotation will be together for at least the next three seasons.

As Terry Collins made his way from one field to another on Friday at the Mets’ training facility, a refrain rose from the fans who followed him.

“We’re gonna win it all this year, Terry,” rippled from the crowd. The prediction sounded occasionally like a question but more often than not like a command, the Daily News noted.

That’s how the spring starts when you skipper the World Series runner-up. That’s also how it goes in February, on the day that pitchers and catchers report, with the date for the rest of the squad to report still a week away.

Collins, 66, happens to be the oldest manager in the majors. And that feels, right, too, especially now that the Mets seem wise for re-signing outfielder Yoenis Cespedes.

Mets slugger Cespedes draws all eyes and ears at spring camp https://t.co/7SVURMpqvm pic.twitter.com/OwXSTVQEaA

— SNY Mets (@SNY_Mets) February 22, 2016

Being a senior also happens to give Collins something in common with many of those who will fill grandstands across Florida and Arizona between now and the start of the regular season.

Big-league baseball in Florida, “is a spring sport played by the young for the divertissement of the elderly – a sun-warmed, sleepy exhibition celebrating the juvenescence of the year and the senescence of the fans,” Roger Angell observed in The New Yorker, 54 years ago this spring.

Manager and retirees aside, the Mets this spring are all about youth, particularly the arms that propelled the team to a pennant. Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard, Steven Matz, Bartolo Colon and Zack Wheeler are the best rotation in baseball, according to ESPN’s Buster Olney.

Both deGrom and Harvey told reporters this winter they would consider playing their entire careers in Queens if the money were right. Of course, that’s what players who are returning to a team coming off a league championship say during the off-season.

Still, the prospect of the right-hander with the shoulder-length locks and the Dark Knight remaining Mets for several seasons feels right, right now, and affirms the possibility that they and their teammates may approach the splendor of 2015.

“I love expectations,” Collins told reporters on Thursday at his first official news conference of the season. “I think they’re great. I tell my players all the time: We create our own expectations.”

“Let the show begin,” he added